Senior Engineering Manager, Search

Instacart

Senior Engineering Manager leading a dedicated Search engineering team at Instacart. Responsible for strategy and execution of search systems driving top-line growth and innovation.

Posted 6/4/2026full-timeRemote • California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Washington • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $221,000 - $279,500 per yearWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the team's technical strategy, roadmap, and goals across Single and Cross retailer search, query understanding, suggestions, Ads on Search.
Drive top-line growth while holding a strict quality bar.
Champion the use of LLMs in search.
Partner with the platform team to design and ship the next-generation search retrieval architecture, while managing the latency and reliability tradeoffs of a tier-1 surface.
Double the team's experimentation velocity by investing in evaluation, AI-native debugging tooling, and ML foundations.
Partner closely with ML, Product, Data Science, the Home and Discovery Platform teams, the Ads organization, and whitelabel retailer teams to translate ranking changes into business and retailer outcomes.
Hire, develop, and coach engineers, and build an inclusive, high-trust team culture.

Requirements

What you’ll need

4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing teams, with minimum 10+ years of total engineering experience
Direct experience building or leading search, recommendations, ranking, or other applied ML systems, as a manager or as a senior individual contributor
Familiarity with modern retrieval techniques, including neural/semantic retrieval, ANN, and LLM-based query understanding or re-ranking
Strong technical depth across machine learning and large-scale distributed/backend systems; able to set direction with and earn the trust of staff-level engineers
A track record of driving complex, cross-functional technical programs from strategy through launch while holding a high bar for quality and reliability
Demonstrated product and business judgment: able to connect modeling and ranking decisions to metrics like conversion and revenue, and to reason through tradeoffs (e.g., relevance vs. latency, organic vs. ads)
Strong communication and stakeholder skills; comfortable bridging technical and non-technical partners.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Health insurance
Retirement plans
Professional development
Flexible work arrangements
Stock options
New hire equity grant

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

engineering managementsearch systemsrecommendations systemsranking systemsmachine learningneural retrievalsemantic retrievalLLM-based query understandinglarge-scale distributed systemsbackend systems

Soft Skills

team leadershipcoachingcommunicationstakeholder managementcross-functional collaborationstrategic thinkingproduct judgmentbusiness judgmenttrust buildinginclusive team culture